1829. ] : Affairs in General.’ 299 
wrecked, he returned to his parents in Northumberland, ‘ as safe and as 
well as when he left them.’ He states that he is brother to Martin, the 
celebrated historical painter. Having obtained employment at his own 
business at Norton, in the county of Durham, he married. On the death 
of his mother, he dreamed that she came to see him, ‘ and told me,’ says 
he, ‘ that I was to be hanged. At another time,’ he adds, ‘ I dreamed, 
and looking up, I saw there was a sea of fire coming upon me, and found 
myself surrounded with it. I thought surely the world was at an end.’ 
He then began to go to the church and chapel by turns. He afterwards 
joined the Methodists. He next travelled to Stockton, where he con- 
ducted himself in such a way as to shew that he was deprived of reason. 
While in this state, he took the resolution to shoot the Bishop of Lincoln. 
The parish officers committed him to a lunatic asylum, from which he 
escaped. Again he was committed, and again escaped from the asylum 
at Gateshead. From that time he seems to have led a vagrant life, sup- 
porting himself by selling his own history, and exhibiting every where 
symptoms of mental derangement. The last event recorded in his history 
is his visit to Lincoln, in September, 1827, where he went to view the 
cathedral, for what purpose is not mentioned. It appears to have been 
his practice to fix written denunciations of vengeance against the clergy 
on the doors of churches.” 
This wretched individual’s story seems true enough, and belongs to the 
multitude of those who with weak brains are set to read “ religious 
books,” as they are called, written by brains as weak as their own. The 
Bible makes no man mad: there is not an irrational, fantastic, or high- 
flown syllable in the language of Revelation. But the writers of these 
books never read the Bible as an instructor—the safest, the only instruc- 
tor—of the great truths by which man is to be raised as well above his 
delusions as above his vices. They look into it only for some quotation, 
which they pervert, or to reinforce some argument, of which they are 
equally incapable to see the force or the falsehood. Toplady and Flavel, 
Scott and Hawker, are their Bible, and the true sources of that infinite 
quantity of blindness, folly, and fanaticism, which among us degrades 
the beauty and the power of religion. This miserable incendiary was a 
reader of their pious nonsense, and by their fruits they are best known. 
We give the following from that high-toned, able, and constitutional 
paper, The Standard :— 
THE IRISH MINSTREL. 
* Now let every string of the Harp of Erin resound to Liberty.”—Association Speech. 
Awake, Old Erin’s tuneless harp ! 
And if thy tones were stern and sharp, 
When earlier traitors bade thee ring 
The praise of Pope, the curse of King, 
Now answer to a darker hand, 
The minstrel of a bloodier band! 
Compound of every baser sin, 
Halt sycophant, half jacobin ; 
Pledging his prostituted soul 
For pees or place’s meanest dole ; 
Seside his country’s yawning tomb 
He sings the victory of Rome. 
2Q2 
